1. Technical Field
The present invention rates generally to computer systems and in particular to the use of graphical windows within computer systems. Still more particularly the present invention relates to the orientation of graphical windows on a display device of a computer system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional applications executing on a computer system utilizes a windowing functionality by which the user-viewable features of the application are displayed to the user in a rectangular-shaped graphical user interface (GUI), commonly referred to as a window. In the computer windowing environment, one or more windows may be open on a computer system at any given time. Each window may have different dimensions (height and width) which are adjustable by the user.
In traditional windowing environment, while users may have multiple windows displayed simultaneously when executing one or more application(s), the display mode of the background operating system (OS) is designed to allow the user to only interact with one current window (or file opened within the window) at a time, and thus the OS hides the previously opened windows “behind” the current window. As a result, there is only one window displayed on the display screen at one time.
Typically, however, windows either overlap each other or are adjacent to each other within the display area with their respective dimensions adjusted to enable the windows to be concurrently displayed on the limited space display device. Occasionally, also, the user desires to have one window designated as always being on top or viewable. This window may, for example, provide a video stream that is being watched by the user while working within another window. It is desirable to be able to maximize use of the viewable display space allocated to a second window when a first window, with dimensions smaller than the maximum display area, is designated to always be open and viewable.
A user is able to open multiple window displays and to view files within these windows by switching among windows. The user may open multiple window displays of different applications, or the user may open multiple files within a single application program, with each file being allocated a separate window. In conventional applications, in order to simultaneously view each file in each window, users have to manually select the OS option “arrange all” from the application program menu to automatically arrange all windows to be viewed simultaneously. Alternatively, the user manually modifies the boundaries of each the window displays to reduce the display area of each window and then manually arrange the windows to fit in one display screen. Depending on the OS being executed, the user may also view multiple window displays simultaneously by selecting the menu option “Tile,” which enables selection of either horizontal or vertical tile viewing mode.